2. I just learned there's a lesser known 'Seoul' - no, not a town
with the same name as the capital, but a homophonous unrelated
Sino-Korean compound 暑鬱 서울 sŏul,
a Chinese medical term that I could calque as 'thermopression'.

I have tried also tried installing the Microsoft Old Hangul
keyboard but I can't get it to actually type in Hangul just in Latin
letters.

There are only 119 results. I guess almost no English speakers care
about this. I used BabelMap to type ᄫᅳᆯ <βɯr> above, but there's
no way I'm going to type more than a few Middle Korean words that way.

5. The link above goes to an enthusiast of the グルジア Gurujia
language. I
should have guessed what that was. Other katakana names are the
obvious ジョージア Jōjia and カルトリ Karutori (< ქართული Kartuli).
Kanji short names are 具語 Gugo and 喬語 Kyōgo; -go is
'language', and Kyō is the Japanese reading of the first
character of 喬治, the Chinese version of 'George'.

6. It just occurred to me that 白 <WHITE> in 白村 Hakusuki
could be just as un-Chinese as 村 <VILLAGE> suki. Suki is
not a Japanese word. According to Wikipedia, Kōjien
regards it as an Old Korean word for 'village'. But I don't know of any
similar Korean word. Could it be a cognate of Korean 시골 shigol
'village' in an extinct Koreanic language: namely, Paekche?

If <WHITE> - read as *bæk in Late Old and Early Middle
Chinese - is actually a phonogram, could it represent a native Koreanic
word - a cognate of Korean 박 pak 'gourd'? Then the Old Korean
name underlying Hakusuki would be 'Gourd Village'.

(3.1.19:56: In 三國史記 Samguk sagi, 朴 [Late
Old Chinese *pʰɔk]
is a transcription of the surname of the founder of Shilla and is
glossed as 'gourd'.

If that gloss is correct, what I wrote two
entries ago could be wrong. It may not be necessary to regard Late
Old
Chinese 斯盧 for Old Korean *sela 'Shilla' from 三國志 Sanguozhi
[Records of the Three Kingdoms, c. 280] as an early transcription *sie
la predating the shift of *-a to *-ɔ in what I
could call Very Late Old Chinese. Perhaps Old Koreans speakers
thought Very Late Old Chinese *-ɔ was similar to their *a
[phonetically back [ɑ]?] and wrote 'Shilla' as very late Old Chinese 斯盧
*sie lɔ
predating the shift of *-a to *-ɔ. According to Coblin
[1983: 103], the *a to *-ɔ [his *-o] shift was
complete by the Western Jin: i.e., the late 3rd century when the Sanguozhi
was compiled. But there is no guarantee that 斯盧 was a transcription
invented on the spot in 28X; it could have been created prior to the
raising and rounding of *a. In any case, reading 斯盧 as
Sino-Korean saro < earlier Sino-Korean sʌro < 8th
century Late Middle Chinese *sz̩ lo is anachronistic. Even a
6th century Early Middle Chinese reading like *si[ə] lo would
be
anachronistic.)

Renowned translator William Scott Wilson offers a fresh version
of the Tao Te Ching that will resonate with the modern reader.
While most translators have relied on the "new" text of 200 B.C.,
Wilson went back another 300 years to work from the original characters
used during Lao Tzu's lifetime. By referring to these earlier
characters, Wilson is able to offer a text that is more authentic in
language and nuance, yet preserves all the beauty and poetry of the
work.

The "original characters"? What does that mean? That earlier shapes
of the characters somehow give more insight? Why not the 'original wording'?
Because "characters" sound so much exotic?

No, he really is referring to the shapes of the characters. In his
own words, "the nuance and meaning of the original characters was
lost"! (p. 11) My Exotik East alarm is ringing. Loudly. No one's going
to invite me to a Japanophile conference. Sniff.

I don't see him using a special old-timey font or anything for the
characters. Are their olde shapes a secret for his erudite eyes only?
(And does it even occur to him that the Mandarin readings he uses are
just as anachronistic as his modern font?)

It gets worse ... "Chinese, as a language based on ideographs" (p.
27) ... characters which wouldn't exist if there weren't a spoken
language to begin with. Characters which the majority of Chinese
through time barely knew or didn't know at all.

The legend of an "ideographic language" is false; reading
Chinese is not grokking images of a man standing by his words or a
woman kneeling under a roof or a bear riding a skateboard through a
dentist's office or whatever. (p. xii)

Of all the documents of the pre-Han China, no one has attracted
and interested Western readers so much as the short and exceedingly
pensive treatise Tao te king [= Tao Te Ching] attributed to an
unknown author around 400 BC. It has been translated several dozen
times into Western languages. The majority of these "translations"
merely reveal that their translators have had very little knowledge of
the Chou-time language.

[...]

In most of these translations [the ones Karlgren regards as
"[t]he most serious attempts" which makes one wonder what he thinks of
the others] we find lines interspersed in the text, being
explanatory speculations of the translators, for which additions the
classical Chinese text has no corresponding passages.

It would be nice to see a Jurchen translation of the Tao Te
Ching. Here's a
Manchu version with the original Chinese and Karlgren's translation
for comparison:

道可道也，

doro be doro oci ojo-ro-ngge,

'way ACC way TOP be-IPFV.PTCP.NMLZ'

BK: 'The Tao Way that can be (told of:) defined'

非恒道也。

enteheme doro waka.

'constant way NEG'

BK: 'is not the constant Way,'

名可名也，

gebu be gebu oci ojo-ro-ngge,

'name ACC name TOP be-IPFV.PTCP.NMLZ'

BK: 'the names that can be named (used as terms)'

非恒名也。

enteheme gebu waka.

'constant way NEG'

BK: 'are not constant names (terms).'

The Wikibooks translation does not match what I see:

There are ways but the way is uncharted;

There are names but not nature in words

I'm glad the ideographic myth hasn't taken root in Jurchenology or
Khitanology. The enigmatic construction of many Tangut characters makes
tangraphy fertile ground for the ideographic myth.

11. I finally got around to rediscovering Blench
and Post 2013. Too much to quote and comment on here. Maybe I can
seriallize my reaction upon rereading it.

12. I keep forgetting to mention my idea of Jurchen

<sin> [ɕiɴ]

in 'rat' possibly being a phonogram derived from or cognate to
Chinese 剩, pronounced *ʂiŋ
in Liao and JIn Chinese. The graph could go back to the Parhae script.
In Parhae times, the eastern Late Middle Chinese reading of 剩 would
have been something like *ɕɦɨŋ. (But why is the Sino-Korean
reading from that period ing [iŋ] instead of †sŭng
[sɯŋ]?)

and various other words where there is no nasal or trace of one. (A
nasal would have blocked the lenition of *qʰ to h [χ]. *saɴ-qʰa-i
would have become Jurchen †sakai.)

And reinterpreting the second character as <nggiyan> isn't
going to work because

<RED.nggiyan?> 'red'

can't be fulnggiyan which violates Jurchen
phonotactics. And
the phonotactics of any language I've ever seen. But what if 'red' was fulanggiyan
with an a to breakup the bizarre sequence -lngg-?

(2.25.21:11: I did not pick a at random to be a filler
vowel; Janhunen (2003: 7) reconstructed Proto-Mongolic *xulaxan
'red'. That *x- is from an even earlier *p-. Is there
any reason to suppose that Mongghulfulaan
'red' has f- from *x- < *p- as opposed to
straight from *p-?)

2.26.18:50: Curiously that Khitan character is not in N4631 which
has two near-lookalikes:

0335 and 0280

I do not know whether those are variants of <TIGER>. I have
not seen 0280 in calendrical contexts (but perhaps its contexts involve
physical tigers), and I have never seen 0335 in context. Here are four
instances of 0280 that I have seen:

......

Epitaph for the 蕭袍魯 Great Prince of the North, line 3 (1041)

......

Epitaph for 蕭袍魯 Xiao Paolu, lines 4-5, 7 (1090)

......

Epitaph for 耶律褀 Yelü Qi, line 23 (1108)

I have no idea where word divisions are. I have provided the
characters preceding and following 280 without knowing whether they
represented words or parts of words.

Ramsey's other informant is a woman with the unusual (to me) name
趙五木禮 <cho o.mok.rye> Cho Omongnye. Are
the characters of her trisyllabic personal name simply phonograms
(there is a native word omok 'concave' - a strange morpheme for
a name - and no native rye; nye 'yes' cannot possibly be
relevant) or is the name really a meaningful
sequence of three morphemes 五 'five', 木 'wood/tree', and 禮
'ceremony/decorum'?

I was hoping South Hamgyŏng would support my hypothesis of
Proto-Korean *e, but ... I'll have to describe how my dream
crumbled some other time.

3. I saw an online ad for Rocketman
starring Taron
Egerton, a graduate of Ysgol
Penglais School, a name that is structually like the equally
redundant Mount Fuji-san in reverse: Ysgol at the
beginning is Welsh for 'school', just as -san at the end is
Sino-Japanese for 'mountain'.

4. 2.27.21:14: BONUS FOURTH ITEM: I forgot
to mention a solution I had on the 22nd to this problem: How can Jurchen

<sol.go> 'Korea' (cf. Manchu solho 'id.')

and Middle Mongolian 莎郎中合思 solangqa-s 'Koreans'
with -o- be reconciled with the Late Old Chinese transcriptions
斯盧 ~ 斯羅 of Old Korean *sela
with *-e-?

斯盧 and 斯羅 appear to be from two different strata of transcriptions
reflecting different stages of Late Old Chinese:

斯盧 *sie la (in more precise notation, *sie lɑ)
predates the shift of *-a to *-ɔ and the shift of *-aj
to *-a. At this stage, 羅 was read *laj and was not yet
appropriate for transcribing foreign la.

斯羅 *sie la postdates the shift of *-a to *-ɔ
and the shift of *-aj to *-a. At this stage, 盧 was read
*lɔ and was no longer appropriate for transcribing
foreign la.

At neither stage did Late Old Chinese have a syllable *sio.
Sio, er, so what if 斯盧 ~ 斯羅 were attempts to write an Old
Korean *sjola? Or - now it occurs to me - *søla?
(But nothing else indicates Old Korean had front rounded vowels.) The
Jurchen/Manchu and Mongolian names for Korea could be based on *sjola
with the simplification of *sj- to s- to fit their
phonotactics. Then later Old Korean shifted *jo (or *ø?)
to *e.

That idea generates more problems, though.

First, how can Middle Korean sjó 'cow' exist if *jo
became *e? sjó would have to come from something other than *sjo
in Old Korean: e.g., *siro with an *-r- blocking the
fusion of *i-o into *e.
But there is no evidence for a disyllabic early word for 'cow'. The
earliest attestation of a Koreanic word for 'cow' is as 首 in the
sinographic spelling of a Koguryo toponym.首 was read as *ɕuʔ in
Late Old Chinese which lacked *sju or *sjo, so 首 might
have been a viable phonogram for a North Koreanic *sjo.

Second, if the Koreanic word had *ø, that vowel should
correspond to Mongolian ö, not the o in solangqa-s.

My guess is that the Jurchen/Manchu and Mongolian names for Korea
are borrowings from a North Koreanic *sjola or the like which
differed as much from Shilla *sela as Polish Lwów
[lvuf] differs from Ukrainian Львів [lʲʋiw] 'Lvov' (But are there any
other cases of northern *jo : southern *e?) 'Old
Korean' or 'early Koreanic' or whatever we call it must have been as
diverse as Slavic or perhaps even Romance are today.

The same must have been true of the Chinese of the time; the
reconstructions here are generic without the regional flavoring that
must have existed. It would be great to see an update of Paul LM Serruys'
1959 study of the 方言 Fangyan
'Regional Words'.

1. I've been meaning to post this since 2.7: I wonder if <so>
orignated as a Parhae script cognate of Chinese 牛 <COW>. What if
that cognate were used to write a North Koreanic cognate of Middle
Korean syó? Then in turn this logogram for a North Koreanic
word was then recycled as a phonogram for Jurchen so. (Although
Jin Qizong [1984: 185] glossed this graph as 'yellow', it appears in
spellings for various unrelated so-words, so it may just be a
phonogram.)

2. Anthony Burgess wrote and slept in a Dormobile.
Nice portmanteau word. Is there a Chinese equivalent of portmanteau
words? Imagine the possibilities in hangul or the Khitan small script.

3. LOL, best use
of the button choice meme I've seen yet by noealz (via Jay Lim via Gerry
Bevers). Knowing which words are Sino-Korean helps a lot in
remembering which words are spelled with ㅐ ae and which ones
have ㅔ e: there are hardly any Sino-Korean morphemes with -e:
the only one that immediately comes to mind is 揭 ke. And
knowing the etymologies of native words helps: e.g., 내- nae-
'to put out' is
from 나 na- 'to come out' + the causative suffix -이- -i-.
But that won't help with monomorphemic 개 kae
'dog' and 게 ke 'crab' which can't be broken down any further.

"Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still
important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the
1990s)"

When I first started learning Korean in 1987, I saw mixed-script
texts and figured I'd better start learning Chinese character readings
right away. I added Sino-Korean readings in pencil to my copy of
Nelson's The
Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary
(still in print after 57 years, and for good reason!). Now I hardly see
Chinese characters in current Korean texts: e.g., on dongA.com's front
page I only see

中文 'Chinese writing' (top of page) and 中國語 'Chinese language'
(bottom of page) for the
Chinese-language edition; the latter is a Korean word Chunggugŏ
which shouldn't be used to indicate a Chinese edition for Chinese
readers

日文 'Japanese writing' (top of page) and 日本語 'Japanese language'
(bottom of page) for the
Japanese-language edition; the latter is a Chinese word which
shouldn't be used to indicate a Japanese edition for Japanese readers

前 chŏn 'previous': without characters could be
interpreted as 'Commander Chŏn'.

5. TIL about the first Cherokee script (and first Native
American-language) newspaper, the ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ <tsa.la.gi
tsu.le.hi.sa.nv.hi> Cherokee Phoenix,
which was first published 191 years ago today. It appropriately came
back to life in modern times.

7. I guessed that 'railroad' in Manchu would be a calque of Chinese
鐵道 'iron road', and voila:
sele-i jugūn 'iron-GEN road' for 鐵路 'railroad' (lit. 'iron
road'; close enough).

8. It is tempting to try to link Manchu sele to Korean 쇠 soe
< Middle Korean sóy 'iron', but

- the vowels are too different (e is higher class and
nonlabial, whereas o is lower class and labial)

- if sóy were from a Proto-Korean disyllable, its Middle
Korean form should have rising pitch rather than a high pitch: †sǒy
< *sòrí with a low pitch syllable followed by
a high pitch syllable

- if I understand Vovin
(2017) correctly, if there ever were a lost liquid in 'iron', it
would have to be *-r-, not *-l-, and Jurchen/Manchu
retain an r/l-distinction lost in Korean, so sele
cannot be from *sere

The first word is just another spelling of -saṅgaṇaka-
'computer'. Hindi drops the final -a
of Sanskrit-based forms. (I hesitate to say 'loanword' here, since I
suspect the word was coined out of Sanskrit for Hindi before being used
in Sanskrit. I can't imagine a Sanskrit neologism for 'computer'
predating a Hindi term.)

The second word is puzzling. yāntrikī is the feminine of
'relating to instruments (yantra)'. But what
is abhi- doing? It is hard to translate. Monier-Williams'
definition:

(a prefix to verbs and nouns, expressing) to, towards, into,
over, upon. (As a prefix to verbs of motion) it expresses the notion or
going towards, approaching, &c (As a prefix to nouns not derived
from verbs) it expresses superiority, intensity, &c

Does it correspond to the en- of engineering? At
first I thought the word was derived from a verb abhi-√yam
in which abhi- was an idiomatic prefix, but there is no such
verb.

How I wish there were Buddhist texts in Khitan. Something other than
funerary texts. But I fear written Khitan was never a vehicle for
Buddhism. Spoken Khitan, however ... oh, to hear a conversation about
Buddhism in Khitan!

13. Does the South Hamgyŏng dialect of Korean preserve pre-vowel
harmony
vocalism? E.g., is manjŏ 'ahead' (mixing the lower vowel a
with the higher vowel ŏ) more conservative than Seoul mŏnjŏ?
See Ramsey (1978: 61) for more examples of South Hamgyŏng a
corresponding to Seoul ŏ.

14. Why do Jurchen

<sol.go> 'Korea' (cf. Manchu solho 'id.')

and Middle Mongolian 莎郎中合思 solangqa-s 'Koreans'
have -o- in the first syllable if they are based on Old
Korean *sela (transcribed in Late Old Chinese as 斯盧 ~ 斯羅; later
respelled as 新羅 <sin.la> - now read Shilla)
with *-e-?
The Jurchen/Manchu forms made me think the labiality of some suffix
spread into the first syllable, but there is no labiality in the
noninitial syllables of the Middle Mongolian form.

¹2.24.15:08: Although it's tempting to regard sam-
and com- as cognates, Proto-Indo-European *kóm
should have become Sanskrit śam, not sam.

1. I would expect 'rat' to be †singger since the
Manchu word is singgeri, and Jurchen mudur'dragon'
corresponds to Manchu muduri 'id'. But the second graph
is <ge>, not <ger>.

The first looks like Chinese 利 'profit' which was read *li
in Jin Chinese. But other versions of it look less like 利:

I don't know why Jin Qizong reconstructed its reading as ʃïn
with a nonfront ï (IPA [ɨ] or [ɯ]?). Was he influenced by the
nonfront vowel in the modern Mandarin pronunciation shen [ʂən]
of the character 申 used to transcribe sing-?

If one believed that Jurchen had frontness harmony, the e in
the second syllable should go with a front vowel i in the first
syllable, not ï.

On the other hand, I think Jurchen had height harmony, and the
higher series vowel i is what I expect to go with e
[ə], the higher series counterpart of a. If i had a
lower series vowel, that would have been ī [ɪ] which would not
coexist with the higher series vowel e [ə] within a root.

Lastly, the *ʂ- of the Ming Chinese transcription 申 *ʂin
reflects a Jurchen s- [ɕ] that is more likely to have
palatalized before a high front vowel i than a nonfront ï
or a less high ī [ɪ].

2.23.11:13: Jurchen s-, like Korean or Japanese /s/,
palatalizes before /i/.

In September 1961 we all arrived in England, which somewhat
reminded us of India. I recall one day David invited us to lunch at
Claridge’s, where he was staying. He led us into the hotel garden and
on the lawn beside the swimming pool gave us exercise books and pencils
and began teaching us the Roman alphabet.

Before starting the journey to the West, we spent a few weeks
together in the frontier town of Kalimpong, in British times the
beginning of the old route from India into Central Tibet, then easily
reached by rail from Calcutta where we would start our air-journey to
Europe. Here I started some lessons in English and in world-geography
and bought them all European style clothes, which they wanted to have
so as not to be so conspicuous in there new setting.

Kman is usually considered a Tibeto-Burman language, part of
the ‘North Assam’ group, a characterisation which goes back to Konow
(1902). However, there is no published argument defending this
classification andBlench & Post (2013) consider it equally likely
to be a language isolate.

10. I had no idea Anthony
Burgess had such a rich linguistic background: e.g.,

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written,
achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the
Colonial Office. He was rewarded with a salary increase for his
proficiency in the language.

[...]

During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered Jawi, the
Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the Persian
language, after which he produced a translation of Eliot's The Waste
Land into Persian (unpublished).

1. The Jurchen logogram <PIG> is clearly cognate to the Khitan
large script logogram

<PIG>

but neither seems to have any cognate Chinese character unless I put
on my pareidolia
glasses and see a resemblance to 亥 'pig (in the 12-animal cycle)'.

I have shown the late form of the character from the vocabulary of
the Bureau of Translators (#162; early 1400s?). Interestingly the
earlier form of the character from the 進士 jinshi
candidate monument (1224)

looks less like the Khitan form. Unfortunately, the
character is not in what remains of the Jurchen Character Book
thought to contain the earliest forms of characters.

2.22.: THEORY HERE

2. Shimunek (2017: 45) reads the Old Mandarin transcription of a
Khitan river name as *niawlaka. He regards the Chinese
transcription of a Serbi river name as a cognate *ñawlag.

He rejects attempts to connect the river name to Khitan

<n.i.gu> 'gold';

the words are too dissimilar. Instead he sees a possible link to *ñaw
'lake'.

One problem is that *a had shifted to *o in Old
Mandarin, so was read *niawloko. In an earlier
period, those graphs would have been read as *niawlaka,
but in that period, a final *-g would have been transcribed as *-k
(as in the Serbi hydronym's transcription), whereas Old Mandarin lacked
final stops, necessitating a whole syllable *-ko to transcribe
foreign *-g.

I think that *-g may have been uvular *-ɢ or *-ʁ
to harmonize with *a.

3. Shimunek (2017: 44) regards the transcriptions of an ethnonym
that Pulleyblank (1983) reconstructed as *tägräg
as "further evidence in support of Beckwith's (2007a) of dialectal
variation between coda *g and *ŋ in northern frontier varieties of Old
Chinese and Early Middle Chinese."

Transcription

丁零

鐵勒

敕勒

狄歷

特勒

Shimunek

*tɛyŋ liayŋ

*tʰɛr (< Beckwith's *tʰêk) lək

*ṭʰik lək

-

-

This site

*teŋ leŋ

*tʰe(ik/t/r) lək

*ʈʰɨək lək

*dek lek

*dək lək

(2.20.1:15: The last two columns are my additions.)

I don't think such variation is necessary. *-k and *-ŋ
are simply two different strategies to transcribe foreign *-g.
There is no need to project *-g into Chinese.

Wikipedia avoids the issue of what the ethnonym was at the time by
taking the easy (though anachronistic) option of reading 丁零 in standard
Mandarin as Dingling,
鐵勒 as Tiele, etc.

4. Vovin
(2003: 97) proposed that Cheju 굴레 kulle
'mouth' "is likely to be connected with Japonic *kutu-
'mouth'." He repeats this proposal on p. 24 in the section on a
possible Japonic substratum of Cheju in his 2009 book.

Three apparent problems: If the Proto-Japonic word for 'mouth' was *kotu-i:

1. Cheju has -u- instead of -o-

(Japonic *o raised to *-u- in Pelagic Japonic
but not Peninsular Japonic)

2. Cheju has -ll- instead of †-l- which is the
expected reflex of intervocalic *-t-

3. Cheju has -e instead of -wi

But Cheju historical phonology seems like unexplored territory and
my Proto-Japonic form could be wrong, so maybe the gaps can be bridged.

And Vovin (2009: 25) thinks 耽牟羅 Thammora has "a transparent
Japonic etymology": it is either cognate to Japanese tani
'valley' + mura 'village' or Japanese tami 'folk' + mura
'village'.

耽 Tham could reflect a reduction of *tani- to *tam-
before *m-.

牟 was read as *mu 'moo' in mainstream Old and Midlde
Chinese. But the Sino-Korean reading 모 mo may indicate an
eastern dialect with *mo for 'moo', as there was no *u
to *o shift in Korean. 牟
represented a word for 'to moo' (as well as various homophones: see
Karlgren [1957: 285] and Schuessler [2009: 184]), and such an
onomatopoetic word might plausibly have vocalic variation. If 牟羅 was
read *mora as in modern Sino-Korean, it could be evidence for a
Proto-Japonic *mora 'village' whose *o raised to u
in Japan but not on Cheju.

6a. The translation gets off to a bad start, mentioning a "Ying
Prefecture" not in the actual text. The
Japanese translation
has similar problems; it starts with 瀛州 'Ying Prefecture'. (Or Yŏng if
one prefers to read it in Korean rather than Mandarin. Both readings
are anachronistic.)

6b. Conversely, the translation ignores a lot before the mention of
the first god
良乙那.

6c. It would be lazy and anachronistic to read 良乙那 with Sino-Korean
readings as ryang + ŭl + na. 乙 is probably a
phonogram for *r (Vovin ). 良 is a problem. Did it transcribe a
syllable beginning with *r-
which would be unusual in initial position in an Altaic language (but
see here)? Or did it transcribe a syllable beginning with an *l-
(cf. its Middle Chinese reading *l) which is possible in Altaic
but unusual for Koreanic?

2.20.1:51: Burling, last seen here, gave me
my first introduction to
Lolo-Burmese via the data in his 1967 book
which I used to write my own
reconstruction. I just realized he used Robert B. Jones' Karen data in
the same way for his book Proto-Karen:
A Reanalysis (1969)!

1. I've now been doing this Jurchen calendar shtick long enough to
recycle the colors (red last came up on
the 9th). Here's the whole cycle:

blue/green > red > yellow > white > black (and back to
green again)

Soon I'll be recycling the animals and won't have to make the
occasional new character image from Jason Glavy's font anymore. Yay! (I
love his font; I just don't love the inconvenience of creating an image
for every character I want to display.)

1a. Jin Qizong (1984: 235) derived <RED> from Chinese 金
<GOLD>
(not <RED>!). 金 cannot be a phonetic loan, as it did not sound
anything
like fulgiyan; its Jin dynasty reading was *kim. (I
don't agree with Shimunek [2017: 106-108] on the absence of *-m
in Jin Chinese; I should go into why later.)

The Khitan large script character

<RED>

looks nothing like the
Jurchen character or Chinese 金 <GOLD>. I thought it might be
related to Chinese 赤 <RED>, but that
character has no similar variants. And to complicate matters
further, Liu and Wang (2004: 23, #84) read this character as a
transcription of Liao Chinese 金 *kim 'gold'!

A problem for the ex Khitanis
hypothesis of the origin of the Jurchen script
is why the Jurchen chose to copy the script of their "worst enemies"
(as Janhunen [1994: 7] put it) in some instances but not others. As
Janhunen asked, why didn't they just adopt the Chinese script or the
simpler Khitan small script? Why seemingly modify the more complex
Khitan large script at random? My view and his is that they did not do
that; rather, they adapted the Parhae script, which, as Vovin (2012)
demonstrated, predates the Khitan scripts. According to this ex
Parhis hypothesis, the Khitan and Jurchen large scripts are
sister derivatives
of the Parhae script rather than a random deformation of the Chinese
script and a derivative of that deformation.

as
<qai> and translates it as 'a discourse deictic demonstrative'
borrowed from and corresponding to (Jin) Chinese 該 *kaj
(my reconstruction) in the bilingual Sino-Khitan Langjun inscription.
But I don't see 該 in the Chinese text. That loan proposal is
phonologically interesting for reasons I should go into later.

Glynne Walley's courses show a lot of breadth - I guessed correctly
that manga would be one topic, but he's done much more spanning the
last millennium, going beyond the written word into rakugo, noh, and
kyōgen (the latter two in a course with the great title "Monkey Fun").

I once thought I was going to be a Japanese literature scholar, but
as you can obviously tell from this blog, I took a big detour and never
turned back.

I love parallel texts; my favorite is the
Korean-English edition of
全光鏞 Chŏn Kwang-yong's 꺼삐딴 리 Kkŏppittan Ri (Kapitan Ri, 1962)
translated by the late Prof. Marshall R. Pihl¹ who
was my Middle Korean
teacher. I just bought the
book on Kindle; it's one of the few stories I've read that has
stayed with me for three decades. Disappointingly
the Kindle version lacks the Korean text which is in the print edition.
At least Prof. Pihl's biography appears in both Korean and English, as
does editor Bruce Fulton's - but Chŏn's own biography is only in
English!

In the story "Kapitan Lee," by Chon Kwangyong, the struggle to
improve one's fortune seems to have taken precedence over loyalty to
family or nation. The protagonist -- Dr. Yi Inguk, alias Kapitan Lee --
constantly strives to amass wealth and protect himself even at the
expense of his fellow countrymen. As he refuses to treat patients who
are unlikely to pay his fees, most of his clients are Japanese before
liberation and members of "the moneyed class" after 1945.

Dr. Yi is divided in his loyalties, and that would all depend
on who is in control. He served the oppressor during Japanese rule, and
when the U.S. is the overlord, he donates a national treasure to the
consul's collection without the slightest sense of guilt. Editor
[Peter H.] Lee
compares the physician to a chameleon, changing his colors to match the
world which surrounds him, no matter how servile his efforts are.

I think Peter
H. Lee
was the translator of that edition. I agree with Gerry Bevers; it's a
shame Prof. Lee doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. In lieu of an entry, I
recommend Bevers'
page on him, including his own memories of the man. Is Prof. Lee
still alive? I also recommend Bevers' entire site, Korean Language Notes.

After all these years I finally figured out that 꺼삐딴 Kkŏppittan
in the title is based on the pronunciation rather than the spelling of
Russian капитан
<kapitan> [kəpʲɪˈtan]. Until now I had been expecting a
transliteration-like rendering of the word as 까삐딴 Kkappittan.
The Russian word has been transliterated in the English
translations of Kkŏppittan Ri; if it weren't, the name would be
something like †Cuppitan with -u- as an attempt to
indicate [ə]. (See A Clockwork Orange for other examples of
Russian in English 'phonetic' spelling: e.g., gulliver for голова
<golova> [ɡəlɐˈva] 'head'. It just occurred to me that Chinese
transcriptions of foreign names are like gulliver: attempts to
approximate foreign names using preexisting elements - though in the
case of gulliver, the preexisting element is the trisyllabic
name Gulliver rather than a syllable.)

The real surprise is bō for 吠 which is normally read ho-
in hoeru < poyu.

2.19.1:09: I tried to come up with a derivation for the name, but it
doesn't work:

*inu-nə poyu-ru saki > Inubōsaki

'dog-GEN bark-ATTR cape' = 'cape where a dog barks'

There are two problems:

First, although *nə-p > *Np > *Nb
> b is possible, the genitive marker nə in a
subordinate clause should not be reduced to N, at least not in
Western Old Japanese. But maybe the name originates from a different
dialect.

Second, neither premodern -oyuru nor modern -oeru
can compress to -ō, unless one posits an ad hoc
development in the source dialect.

I would expect bō to be from an earlier *nə-popu or *nə-papu.
There was no verb †popu, but there is a papu which
became modern 這う hau 'to crawl'. It seems then that the name is
from

*inu-nə pap-u saki > Inubōsaki

'dog-GEN crawl-ATTR cape' = 'cape where a dog crawls'

without any ad hoc compression (apart from the unexpected
reduction of *nə). The name could theoretically be
written as †犬這埼 'dog-crawl-', but 吠 'howl' is semantically preferable
to 這 'crawl'.

2.19.0:38: I didn't realize 犬吠埼 Inubōsaki contains the animal for
this entry until the start of the next day, the day of the red pig!

2.20.23:05: The absence of 𘤃 'grass'
(herbal medicine?) in those characters makes me wonder if 1vyq3
and 2jeq2 were not 'medicine men' unlike the other two words
I've mentioned so far:

𗄤 4536 2ror4 < *Cɯ.roH
'wizard, witch,
sorcerer'

𗄥 4550 1lheq4 < *Sɯ-ɬe
or *Sɯ-ɬaŋ 'wizard, sorcerer'

Is the shared *S- in three out of the four words so far
significant?

I wouldn't take the slight differences in the definitions from Li
Fanwen (2008) too seriously. Ditto for the Chinese definitions I
haven't quoted. I suspect neither the English nor the Tangut captures
the true differences between the words. Which is not Li's fault - there
is nothing to go on but the brief, circular definitions from the Tangut
dictionary tradition which define them in terms of each other.

I'm glad these words have survived at all; a wealth of pre-Buddhist
Khitan and Jurchen - and Pyu! - vocabulary has probably vanished
without a trace. But who knows what lurks among the undefined words in
extant Khitan and Pyu texts?

1. The Jurchen logogram <CHICKEN> might be related to the Khitan
large script character

<CHICKEN>

but the resemblance is vague at best.

The Jurchen and Khitan words may also be related somehow - the small
script spelling of the Khitan word

tells us that 'chicken' was something like t-Qa, but there
is no agreement on what was between the t- and -a. The
latest reconstruction I've seen is Shimunek's (2017: 372) taqa
<t.aq.a>.

The vocabularies of the Bureau of Translators and
Interpreters have different transcriptions of the second syllable of
'chicken': 和 *xo (BoT #152) and 課 *kʰo (BoI
#332, #424). The Chinese forms are only approximate, but there is no
doubt that one had an initial fricative and the other had a stop.

Vovin
(1997: 274) proposed that Jurchen/Manchu intervocalic *-k-
became -h-, Other Tungusic forms for 'chicken' point to a
medial stop. So it seems then that Jurchen tiqo [tɪqʰɔ] in the
later Bureau of Interpreters vocabulary is from a conservative dialect
that didn't lenite *-k-, whereas the earlier Bureau of
Translators form tiho [tɪχɔ] is from an innovative dialect that
did. There is no evidence for a nasal that would have blocked lenition:
*-nk- > -k-.

Manchu coko [tʂʰɔqʰɔ] may be a borrowing from a conservative
dialect preserving a medial stop. The first vowel of the Manchu form
seems to have assimilated to the second vowel.

2.19.19.24: Wu and Janhunen (2010: 260) noted the similarity of
Khitan small script character 39

with the modern simplified Chinese character 开 kai which in
turn also happens to resemble Jurchen <CHICKEN>. Since 雞
'chicken' in Middle Chinese was *kej (something like *kaj
in the south - far from the Jurchen!), it is tempting to come up with a
pseudoexplanation for the Jurchen graph: tiko was written as a
variant of 开 which almost sounded like 雞 'chicken'. But that
would be anachronistic.

As far as I know, no one has proposed a reading for 39. The
diacritic <ˀ> in Kane's (2009: 301) <kải> indicates that
it is a placeholder transliteration chosen purely for visual similarity
with 开 kai; it is not meant to indicate that Kane thinks 39 was
pronounced kai.

39 probably did not stand for a single segment. It is only attested
twice in the corpus in Research on the Khitan Small Script
(1985): once in the epitaph for Empress 宣懿 Xuanyi (18.10.1) and once in
the epitaph for the 許王 Prince of Xu (39.9.2). It occurs just once in
the epitaph for Xiao Dilu (45.4). It is in initial positon before

<is>

in Xuanyi and Dilu and before

<as>

in Xu. Could its reading end in a consonant? Or in i if
<as> is an error for <is>?

2. It took me thirty years to figure out that the Korean honorific
nominative/ablative particle kkesŏ is an example of double
indirectness
as politeness. That explains why it is both nominative and ablative
(not a combination I'm used to from an Indo-European perspective):

- kəkɯj 'to that place' contains the dative-allative
marker -ɯj 'to', so presumably kək was once a noun
'place' - but how did the -ŋ- ~ -k- variation come
about? Vovin (2003:
96, 2009: 96 [on the same page in two different publications!])
proposed that Middle Korean intervocalic -k- is from
Proto-Korean *-nk-. Two possibilities:

- the demonstratives used to have a final *-n (related
to the realis attributive -n?) that was reanalzyed as part of
the following word: *kɯn + kəkɯj > kɯ +
ŋəkɯj (with irregular fusion of *-nk- to ŋ- in that
phrase but regular fusion to -k- in kəkɯj?)

- the original word for 'place' was disyllabic nVkək,
reduced to ŋək ~ kək

Martin (1992: 577) analyzed Middle Korean iŋəkɯj 'to this
place' as i-ŋək-ɯj. There is no doubt that i is 'this'
and ɯj is 'to', but initial ŋ- is odd in a native word.

4. David Boxenhorn asked me about Altaic vowel harmony.
I don't have time to say much, but I can type a few introductory
remarks here.

Altaic can be thought of as a continuum of five families in contact
from east to west:

West: front harmony

Central red
zone: height harmony

East: no vowel harmony

Turkic

Serbi-Mongolic

Tungusic

Koreanic

Japonic

Turkic has frontness harmony like Uralic languages to the west:

Languages in what I call the red zone (after their shared
word for 'red') have height harmony:

I believe Old Chinese and possibly also Tangut went through a height
harmony phase influenced by Altaic neighbors.

Japonic has no vowel harmony beyond Arisaka's law: a tendency
against having *ə coexist with *a, *o, or *u
within a root. See section 7.1.1.3 of this
file by Bjarke Frellesvig (who writes *ə as *o and *o
as *wo). In Japonic, there are no sets of harmonizing
affixes like those in other Altaic languages.

Wikipedia led me to Yoshida
(2006) on i becoming e to assimilate to an e
in the same word in modern Kyoto Japanese, but that is not like any
other form of Altaic vowel harmony.

6. Robbins
Burling in Proto-Karen: A Reanalysis (1969: 12) used
phonostatistical arguments against Robert B. Jones'
(1961: 100) reconstruction of twelve final
nonglottal stops in Proto-Karen. (Compare with Proto-Karen's relative
Old Burmese which only had four final stops: -k, -c,
-t, -p; -c was ultimately secondary. Pyu had only three final
stops: -k, -t, -p.) All appear only 1-3 times in Jones'
reconstruction and are hence suspicious.

When I encounter rarities in Pyu, I note them and file them away
instead of immediately granting them phonemic status.

Looking at Burling's (1969: 30-31) own reconstruction, I see
asymmetries in his rhymes that I want to explore later.

The tones fall readily into 6 major correspondence patterns.
Little phonetic sense can be made of these correspondences. A high
rising tone in one language may correspond regularly with a low falling
tone in another, and in some cases even checked tones in one language
correspond to smooth tones in others. Nevertheless, since the number of
tones is small, and the number of examples of each is large, the
correspondences hardly seem questionable.

My first encounter with this phenomenon was when I first read about
Cantonese in 1990. I was accustomed to standard Mandarin, whose tones
correspond with those of Cantonese as follows in sonorant-final
syllables (*stop-final 'checked' syllables are complicated):

10. Sort of answering my own question,
I finally got around to hearing Rihanna's pronunciation of care
at about :31 in "Work".
It sounds like [kjɛɹ] to me. "Sort of" because I don't know how
representative that pronunciation is.

tonight. I'll just say that it has a near-mirror image
(near-?)synonym

𗄥 4550 1lheq4 'wizard,
sorcerer'

with 𘤃 'grass' (herbal medicine?) and 𘤧 'small' (referring to the size of the herbs?)
in opposite places under 𘠋 '?' and
stop there for now.

13. Shimunek (2017: 218) reconstructed Khitan

'was caused to serve' (Shimunek's translation)

as [r̩lgər] which is doubly un-Altaic: Altaic languages do not have
native words with r-
(Khitan may prove that to be a myth) or syllabic liquids. Typology
aside, there is
nothing phonetically implausible about his proposal. However, others
would
read that word very differently: e.g.,